Political and ideological beliefs are at the core of discussions on monumentality, from the CIAM conferences and conversations in the aftermath of WWII, to more recent investigations of loss, mourning and memory.

On Monumentality presented 11 contemporary manifestations of the ideas, forms and spaces that represent and signify collective aspiration today.

The event, organized in collaboration with the “Monument to Cold War Victory” competition, examined through varying notions of monumentality the enduring genre of war monuments, memorials, and institutionally framed and commissioned artworks.

This event was open to all. Seat reservations at Storefront Series events are available to Storefront members. If you are interested in becoming a Storefront member, click here.

About the participants

Constantin Boym is a New York-based artist, designer, and a founder of Boym projects.

Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist living and working in Houston, Texas and New York City. She is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Pollack/Krasner Award. She was awarded a fellowship from the Pennies from Heaven Fund, for her contribution to New York City as a visual artist for work that is advanced, experimental, and socially visionary. Carroll teaches architecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where in 2009 she realized Project Prototype 180, a work of art that aimed to make architecture performative by inverting an acre of land and the domestic structure that is on it 180 degrees. Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the ICA, London; Museum fur Volkerkunde, Munich; the ICA, Philadelphia; MOMUK, Vienna; and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.

Sasha Chavchavadze is an artist who has exhibited her paintings, drawings and installations internationally for twenty-five years. Her interdisciplinary Cold War project, Museum of Matches(www.museumofmatches.com), was presented in exhibitions at Kentler International Drawing Space and the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn; as a “one-room Cold War museum” at Proteus Gowanus; as excerpts in the magazines Cabinet, Bomb and NYFA Current; and as a book by Proteotypes in 2011. Chavchavadze is the founder and co-creative director of Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery in Brooklyn where she has for ten years creatively developed numerous exhibitions and projects, including the Berlin Tunnel Project and Battle Pass, which she recently presented at the Museum of Modern Art.

Adeola Enigbokan is an artist, teacher, and environmental psychologist practicing urban interventions in New York City.

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them the exhibition and book project “Lenin for Your Library?” and “Communist Guide to the Museum of Modern Art.”

Peter Goin is an American photographer best known for his work within the altered landscape, specifically his photographs published in the book Nuclear Landscapes. His work has been shown in over fifty museums nationally and internationally and he is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Goin is currently a Foundation Professor of Art in Photography and Videography at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has also done extensive rephotography work in the Lake Tahoe region. Peter’s photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty museums nationally and internationally, and he is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

Stamatina Gregory is an independent curator and critic based in New York. She has recently organized projects for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, The Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, and the Venice Biennale. She is the Associate Dean at the School of Art at the Cooper Union.

Justin Jampol is the Executive Director and Founder of The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War in Culver City, CA.

Vitaly Komar is a Russian-born painter and performance artist, based in New York.

Since 1998, Brooklyn-based artist Lisi Raskin has traveled to the Arctic Circle, former East German and Yugoslav Atomic bunkers, and through the American west exploring the intersection of nuclear-age fears and utopian mythologies as they manifest in oral histories and the architectures of the Cold War. Raskin’s on-site research has informed the making of paintings, drawings, objects, videos, and large, constructed environments that she has exhibited internationally. In 2013, Raskin was the recipient of a Creative Time Global Residency grant that she used to explore Soviet infrastructural projects, war museums, and monuments in Kabul and Herat in Afghanistan.This research will be the subject of two upcoming solo shows that open in April at Churner and Churner and Art in General in New York.